If you want to attempt the experience

… don’t just do it higgledy-piggledy!

Tell yourself that you have some energy capital, and use it wisely! False starts often end in a cascade of failures, each new attempt failing in turn, as if the reserves of will necessary to free oneself from the kitchen were wasted. The same goes for quitting smoking: it is better not to miss the boat and get it right the first time.

We must be aware of the different attachments that make us slaves to the art of cooking. First, the simple habit, the things we do every day that are easier because they’ve been around for years. More significant, there are the conditioning, that is to say the reflexes reinforced by the experiences of pleasure. Every time we suck on a candy or eat a cake, the taste pleasure acts on the reward system, and trains the animal in us to repeat the same behavior. Conditionings are learned quickly, a few experiments are enough, but very stubborn when it comes to erasing them.

Added to this is the addictive effect of various substances in our food and drinks. Exorphins, endorphin-like substances that govern conditioning processes, produce changes in the brain similar to hard drugs like morphine or heroin. Exorphins are found in particular in dairy products, which explains their particularly addictive properties. But many other molecules, especially among AGEs, can have a similar action. Other stimulants, for example alkaloids like caffeine or theine, cocoa theobromine, not to mention alcohol in all its forms, associated with daily food, make us once again dependent on them.

These are only the physiological effects of food, doubled by psychological factors. Everything we have been told from early childhood about the benefits of our food is recorded in depth. It’s not a simple decision that will free us from it. Food is part of our value system. Changing our creed amounts to rejecting a whole series of beliefs, convictions, reflexes of thought, acts of trust in our parents and in society, which are for us as many beacons of security. Abandoning them ipso facto represents a deep loosening which makes it particularly fragile in the face of any difficulty arising in a new practice.

Even more deeply are hidden unconscious elements of a psychoanalytic nature. The food received in childhood is an integral part of parental images, especially that of the foster mother. The first meals after weaning were a continuation of breastfeeding, as a substitute for breast and maternal love. All the love of gastronomy has been built on this foundation, and to question it is to renounce the love of parents for the little child who still lies dormant in us. However, no frustration is worse than that of love. Separating from the kitchen is unconsciously as painful as separating from the parents for the child placed in a colony and who is going through a period of cockroach, or for a partner with whom one has built his life, whose departure causes a deep depression.

To complicate matters, the pleasure that one can experience with raw foods only comes gradually. During a first period, it is only a small part of what it should be and remains below culinary pleasures. The discovery of natural pleasure takes a different time depending on the food, depending on the characteristics of the previous diet and individual peculiarities. The normalization period is sometimes very short, if not zero, but overall it takes several weeks to achieve an overall amount of enjoyment that balances gastronomic memories.

Over time, this overall amount, as well as the particular enjoyment intensities with each food, significantly exceed what the most sophisticated recipes can provide. The difficulty therefore consists in “holding on” long enough, until the balance of power changes from an unstable equilibrium, made of the fight against temptations, to a stable equilibrium, based on the rehabilitation of natural pleasures and forgetting past pleasures, gradually felt like so many illusions of meaning.

The most effective, if not essential, way to shorten this intermediate period is the quality of the practice. A whole series of rules have emerged in the course of numerous experiments, the putting into practice of which is often the sine qua non of success. These rules do not in any way affect the freedom of instinct, they are on the contrary made to guarantee this freedom. They should be imposed on ourselves only in the beginning, until the instinctive manifestations have gained sufficient force to take control. But they are imperative for those who want to succeed in the conversion without leaving feathers.

Note in this regard that any instinct requires a minimum of learning. The dietary instinct should be structured in early childhood, already before weaning, while breast milk provides minimal well-being in the event of clumsiness. Not only is the older beginner deprived of this guarantee, but learning with processed foods represents a large series of unnatural reflexes that must be erased in order to make room for natural reflexes. The whole being further slowed down by the reduced learning capacity once the sensitive period of the first years has passed.

The above should not discourage you, on the contrary: before going to war, you must bring together all the assets that will guarantee you success. Going haphazardly guarantees failure and costs much more in psychological capital, and even in money. One of the most frequent and most irresistible drifts is indeed the trap of bulimia: eating too much lowers the level of pleasure on ingestion and the benefit of digestion, so that we are trapped in spite of ourselves. in a vicious regulation of quantities. It pays off in well-being, sometimes in health, and inevitably in money. A budget can easily be doubled or tripled, with little benefit, which would make the experience prohibitive from any point of view.

To counterbalance all these negatives, it is essential to be aware of all the benefits that instinctonutrition can provide. One of them is good ecological conscience. The molecular denaturation induced by culinary preparations is a form of pollution, both of the human body and of the environment where these materials inevitably spread. This pollution factor is not yet taken into account, neither by medicine which does not take it into account in the genesis of diseases, nor by ecology which neglects the possible role of new chemical species in health and balance of the biocenosis. Medical research has barely discovered the toxic effects of EFAs and ALEs in the body, when environmentalists do not seem to have yet considered the fact that cooking food is a factor of chemical pollution like any other. Except that the same taboo obliterates the question of environmental pathology as it obliterates in terms of human pathology. In both cases, the incalculable number of new chemical species produced by culinary chemical reactions suggests the existence of non-degradable molecules, liable, like molecules produced by the chemical industry, to disrupt natural biological processes. . Instinctonutrition appears here as an application of the precautionary principle and can reassure all those who have any ecological fiber.

The second big advantage of the original diet: the freedom to enjoy! Apart from culinary tricks, foods that are useful to the body are delectable to the palate, so the pursuit of pleasure is enough to gain health. This requires carefully choosing the food by smell, then discontinuing its consumption as soon as it no longer seems so tasty, so as to leave more room for pleasure with another food.

The paradox is then that the fact of obeying the pleasure feels at the same time as an obedience to the body, and as a fundamental freedom, since this one consists by nature to seek the pleasure… A small nod to philosophy : the simple return to the laws of nature reestablishes the first unity between obedience and freedom… Hell if these two concepts seem opposed in the ordinary context!

Hence the converse: culture, largely based on the fundamental opposition between free will and obedience, could arise from a paradoxical dissociation, produced by culinary artifice or artifice in general, between two aspects of a single and the same greatness: the happiness of being. The artifice allows us to provide ourselves with pleasures that we know to be harmful, so we must create rules and fight against temptations. It is then by disobeying these rules that we obtain pleasures, which are moreover harmful. We are therefore constantly caught between envy and reason.

Whereas nature had organized, through the laws of evolution, a perfect harmony between pleasure and benefit. A pleasure leading to a harmful act represents negative selection pressure, so any such pleasure is eliminated over the generations. The only mechanisms with pleasure that can pass the filter of natural selection must of necessity be something useful. Rediscovering the serenity that this organization of pleasure provides is certainly one of the greatest contributions of instinctotherapy.

To the above points can be added, as guarantees of success, the relearning of the dietary instinct, and more technical questions of supply.